Carter’s Story, Part II

Walking with Carter was wonderful. Except for my need to be a good dog mother, I would not have pushed myself out into the forest. I’ll say this again: I was fading away from my life. But Carter and the forest teamed up to reminded me that awe was always afoot, and not far away at all. I watched leaves go to gold and drift down on us in a blazing yellow snowfall. I found  trees with fresh-sprouted conks and patches of stout mushrooms. Boughs cracked like autumn thunder off in the forest. I watched my strong young dog racing, panting, barking and leaping into life along winding trails, and swimming in small lakes and fat streams. Perhaps a tiny part of me became a tiny bit of all that that. In this way, Carter kept a part of my life expanding and rejoicing, while so much of the rest of me continued sinking.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, and that means dank cold and slogging rain through the winter months and sometimes long into spring. Forest trails became treacherous mud bogs for me, as my balance suffered along with all the rest of me. As the rains set in, our chances for forest walks started drying up. Carter began pacing the house on rainy days, muttering under his breath, “Wuuf,” as he wandered room to room and back again. He knotted his brow. I was became vexed, wondering what in the world I could offer him to pass these many months of dark moons.

Some dogs have faces and expressions hidden by long hair. Some dogs don’t have a lot of expressions, but Carter was blessed with a rubber face. He could raise an  eyebrow or two when he wanted to say, “Huh?” He could pull his face and ears back when he needed to look serious. His mouth could show Uh-Oh, Ha! and Oh goodie!! Sometimes, he would hold a meditative expression for long moments. When frustrated he could throw down a sigh that made is lips go wubba-flubba. To speak back to him, I’d use words, but more often hand motions or facial expressions of my own. But more and more, we seemed to be speaking to each other from our hearts.

A trainer taught me to help Carter learn willpower by laying on his bed and staying there for long periods. Of course, he would do this for me and stop pacing, but it did nothing for his bottled-up energy and was actually just another kind of prison, like the leash. Carter told me all about it with long sighs and infrequent groans, captive there on his bed.

However, the trainer also offered us a brilliant solution to our winter exercise conundrums: “Get a treadmill for cheap off of Craigslist. Teach him how to run on that!” Honestly, I never would have thought of this myself. I quickly found a twenty-dollar treadmill and a fellow who would bring it into the house and set it up in the dining room we rarely used. YouTube had great videos that gave me some guidance on how to accustom Carter to the noise and motion, and get him to think it would be a good idea to get aboard.

For Carter, treats are one of the ultimate joys of his dog life. They are his greatest motivating force, even more than his affection for me. So I began training by putting treats on the stationary treadmill, encouraging Carter to step onto the machine to gobble them. Next I started the treadmill moving very, very slowly as Carter stood alongside and gobbled treats as they meandered past him like a floating sushi bar. Needless to say, he loved this game of treat-sushi and told me with his eyes that he would be happy to play it all day long. Finally, I used a harness and leashes to anchor him on the treadmill so he could stay steady when it began to move, positioning myself at the head with treats in my hand. I started the machine, and low-and-behold, Carter trotted along happily as I kept funneling treats his way.

I set the treadmill to a comfortable quick trot and Carter bounced along, grinning and gobbling. I would run him this way until his tongue began flopping side to side, which would usually take about 20 to 25 minutes. This became our winter routine each morning. (Seven years later, it remains our routine every morning, every season.) That winter, I sat on a stool with my coffee mug and treats at the head of the treadmill, hooked Carter up, and off he would go. A few months later, I abandoned the harness and leashes, and he started stepping onto the treadmill before I even managed to fill my coffee cup.

I taught Carter to catch balls for afternoon engagement time. He loves catching balls, but harbors a deep dislike for frisbees. If I try to inject a frisbee toss into his ball catching, He’ll give me the side-eye, watching while the plastic disc arcs, wobbles, and crashes. “Really, Mom. REALLY?”  When the spring came, we added swimming to Carter’s to-do list. He took to the water like an otter, and sometimes, it was hard to call him back out. We lived in a land of many rivers and Carter was happy to try them all. Carter blossomed into a happy, healthy, well-adjusted young dog. Then slowly, sadly, I began ruining all that.

Three times over the next few years, I checked myself into a mental hospital to try to find a way out of my ill health with the right combo of drugs. Major depression has been my shadow for many decades. Medications work—for awhile. Mental wards are formidable places, nothing at all like a hospital. But they were the only places I could get daily psychiatric attention, and a fast track onto a wide sample medications.

So in I went. That first time I was gone, My husband changed Carter’s diet to cheap kibble, which is easier to prepare than his homemade meals. The treadmill routine was ignored. There were no walks or balls tossed. I was not there each night to take Carter with me to leave a food dish in the garden shed for our resident possum. The possum went hungry. When I came home a week later, Carter suddenly became a velcro dog, touching my hip with his nose all throughout the day, reminding me he was close and would stay that way.

The second time I was gone, My husband suffered a bad fall and his son took him off to the hospital. When I came home, I jumped into care-giver mode, where I stayed for the next year. Forest walks were not as often, Some evenings, I would fall unconscious on the floor and EMTs would haul me off while Carter barked ferociously behind the closed bedroom door. Sometimes late at night after taking a host of night pills that left him dizzy and disoriented, my husband would blow his whistle and I would leap out of bed to help hold him up to get to the bathroom.

Carter watched us from the sidelines as every day seemed to bring a new calamity or crisis. My husband could not help me. I could not help him. We were two failing people with no way to help ourselves out of the horrific mess we had fallen into. The stability of Carter’s life, and of our family life, loosened beneath our feet like a carpet unraveling. Carter’s smiling yellow eyes took on a frown. His floppy red ears hung low along with his plume of a tail. He circled up in his bed, trying to look small. Often, he would climb onto my lap—all 65 pounds of him—and tuck his head down against my chest.

One morning, I grabbed my walking stick and shuffled down the street in my pajamas and slippers to let Carter run in a miniature empty park three short blocks from my house. At the start of the dirt path, the familiar canopy of Douglas firs and alders folded above my head and I pressed my fists into my forehead, wimpering,”I don’t know what to do…I don’t know what to do.” Down the path and out into the glade, I never stopped crying, “What can I do? I don’t know what to do…” Carter brought me one stick after another, and I flung them out into the wet grass. I was half a step away from suicide.

I wandered home in wet slippers while Carter clonked my leg with a thick stick he seemed especially proud of. With my last droplet of hope fast evaporating, I decided to try the mental ward one last time. If that didn’t work, oblivion would be my final option.

So off I went to a third facility. My husband’s parting words were, “Stay here until you get better. I can’t go on like this.” Neither of us could. I arranged for his  son to stay at the house and care for his father and the pets while I was gone. Blessedly, two weeks into my stay, a particular cocktail of several strong antidepressants began burning off some of the fog in my head. Christmas Eve, I fell unconscious and knocked my head hard against the wooden corner of my bed. I spent Christmas Eve in an emergency hospital, returning to my mental ward Christmas Day to learn by phone that further catastrophes were striking at home like bombs dropping in an unending barrage.

I had begun a very slow healing journey that I sensed would take many months to unfold. In the midst of it, I came to a certainty in my bones that I could not return to my home for a long time, if ever. (I could write chapters about why I felt I had to choose this, but we won’t go there.) I believed then and now that leaving was the only way to save my life, and once I made the decision, I never once questioned it. My husband reacted to this news with explosive and vicious anger, screaming at me through the phone, hanging up on calls from my doctor and social worker.

In all, I would stay at the mental asylum for a month. I literally had no idea where to go or what to do when I got out. At the train station in town, an old friend picked me up in early January and took me to her house for the time being. The universe, unbidden, had sent me this angel who housed and fed me as I struggled with how I might feed and house myself on twelve hundred dollars a month.

To Be Continued One More Time…